We have passed a landmark in Iraq. Over 200 soldiers have died in the war since it began March 20. At least 63 American soldiers have died in Iraq since major combat was declared over May 1. Do not think that the war is over just because George Bush declared major combat over. U.S. forces kicked off operation Sidewinder Sunday, raiding more than 20 towns across a wide swath of Iraq and netting at least 60 suspects in a show of air and infantry power designed to crush resistance and stem a wave of deadly attacks on American troops. But I guess it wasn't 'major combat.'

Are the anti-American forces organized? Insurgents have stepped up their attacks against U.S. troops in recent days, but U.S. officials have said repeatedly that there is no centralized Iraqi resistance to American rule. Commanders on the ground suggest some organization. A substantial amount of the damage to Iraq's services is the result of organized elements out to undermine allied administration of Iraq. Much of the organization seems to be centered in the Sunni areas most loyal to the Baathists and Saddam Hussein. This brings up the question of whether Saddam is still alive and coordinating attacks on Americans.

Allied officials say they recently obtained a document prepared by the Iraqi Intelligence Service calling for a sabotage campaign in case of Saddam Hussein's defeat. The plan outlines 11 steps to spread chaos in Iraq to discredit the occupiers, including looting and burning government offices, sabotaging power plants, cutting communication lines and attacking water purification plants. More in this article in the New York Times.

Are we seeing the establishment of a new American Empire? The term has been showing up quite a bit in the news and in popular discourse lately. One can often see bumper stickers in more liberal neighborhoods that state "No Empire" in place of the "No War in Iraq" signs. Do a Google search for "American Empire" and you can get over 100 results in the news, including The Globe and Mail, Canada; Seattle Post Intelligencer; The Financial Times of London; New Zealand Herald; Vancouver Sun, Canada; London Daily Telegraph; and The Nation. There are many more.

Currently, we have two countries under occupation as a result of war, Iraq and Afghanistan, and are fighting to control them. We rule directly in Iraq, but through a government we sponsor in Afghanistan. We have troops fighting insugency movements in Colombia and the Phillipines. We have troops based on every continent, mainly to keep the peace and to maintain an environment conducive to free trade, which supports the US economy. Often, these troops are based in places to protect shipping routes for oil, without which the American economy would collapse.

Is the focus on Empire a function of the growing importance of the US military in reshaping the world, of its power within the Bush administration? Perhaps it is the changed circumstances in American life post-September 11? The fear of terrorism has created a situation where Americans are willing to trade away civil liberties in return for security. This concentrates more power in the hands of those who hold the reins of the security apparatus in Washington. Isn't the main requirement of empire having an emperor?

There is an article asking the question of whether American is now an Empire in the New York Journal News. Conservative columnist Georgie Ann Geyer at the Boston Globe disagrees. For others, the question of whether the US now controls an Empire seems to be settled. The question being asked now is not whether we control an empire or even whether we should. William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and a leading proponent of American empire, claims that there is nothing wrong with dominance as long as it is for the "right values." Given that the US now control Iraq and is the predominant power throughout the world, the question more commonly asked now is how do we manage the empire? This is the subject of an interview with Robert Kaplan in the Atlantic Monthly for July/August. There is a host of articles by Franz Schurmann at the Pacific News Service exploring the Politics of Empire.

In a new article in the New York Times, the Bush Administration is accused of editing a paper on the state of the environment to remove a discussion of the risks of rising global temperatures. Jeremy Symons, a climate policy expert at the National Wildlife Federation said "This is like the White House directing the secretary of labor to alter unemployment data to paint a rosy economic picture." To use another analogy, it is like directing the CIA to alter intelligence information in order to gain public and international support for going to war.

Events of interest in the past week:

Today, US Forces caught the highest ranking Baath Party member, the Ace of Diamonds, Abid Hamid Mahmoud al-Tikriti. Read about it in the New York Times.

Chaos has continued throughout Iraq as the US tries to get a handle on it. Services are slowly being restored, but former Iraqi Army soldiers are demonstrating about the lack of work. Today, the US fired on one such demonstration in Baghdad, killing two. The US had sponsored a planned election of local officials in Najaf. Paul Bremer III, the head of the American military occupation in Iraq, decreed that conditions in Najaf were not appropriate for an election. What this likely means is that the winner would likely be someone that Mr. Bremer did not approve of. New York Times again.

Students have been demonstrating against the government in Tehran, Iran for the past week. It is unclear what effect it is having on the government or whether the protests are beginning to die down or increase. The government sent police to break up demonstrations, but pro-government militias have been attacking the demonstrators, often beating them. Protests have spread to the provincial cities of Hamedan, Mashhad, Karaj, Isfahan, Kerman, Kermanshahr and Tabriz as well. The official news in Iran describes them as small. BBC has more.

In addition to the pressure on the Mullahs by students and other demonstrators, there has been international pressure on Iran for its pursuit of nuclear technology. BBC and New York Times. This week, the EU and Russia have both stated concerns that the program is leading to the development of nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency has demanded more rigorous inspections to ensure compliance with the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. The treaty is designed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapon technology throughout the world. A consequence of this is that only a few countries have nuclear weapons and they have a stranglehold on the power that comes with it. Included on the list are the US, Britain, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel. For this reason, many smaller countries either have rejected the treaty, like North Korea, or are secretly violating it, like Iran is now and Pakistan did in the 1990's. The nuclear countries do not want to see any other countries gain nuclear weapons because it represents a quantum increase in their political power. Nuclear armed countries cannot be bullied or threatened into toeing the line if they have a nuclear deterrent. This is the reason that the North Koreans have given for developing them.

The Israel-Palestinian conflict is in chaos after attacks and counterattacks by Hamas and the Israeli government. It seems that, in the deadlocked political situation, a radical organization can use violence to define the terms of the debate. It seems that neither Hamas nor right-wing Israelis want peace. The goal on each side is total victory. On the Israeli right, the radicals want nothing more than a Jewish state over all of Palestine, including the territories of Judea and Samaria, as they call the West Bank. They can gain this only if there is a war against the Arabs in the occupied territories. If there is peace, then Israel must give up its claims to the land, which the ultra-right adamantly opposes. In the current political climate, they can keep the war going by forcing the government to continue assassinating high level Hamas or Islamic Jihad leaders.

On the other side, Hamas has a goal of total victory as well. Many of their leaders have publicly stated that they will drive the Zionists into the sea. Given the imbalance of power, it seems unlikely that this will happen. However, violence is their only tool to keep the debate on their terms. All Palestinian politicians at least give lip service to the demand that all of Palestine should be controlled by the Palestinians, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. To say otherwise would be political suicide. Of course, such an arrangement would not mean that all Jews must leave, but it would require the end of the State of Israel, which is defined as a Jewish state.

It appears that much is happening behind the scenes. There are conflicting reports every day as to whether Hamas will agree to a truce, whether Israel will give up its policy of assassination. We hear about high level Egyptian and American envoys meeting with factions on both sides. There has even been talk of freeing Marwan Barghouti, a very popular Palestinian Fatah politician who has been suggested as a successor to Yassir Arafat. Arial Sharon seems to be making minor concessions under American pressure. Nothing is clear, especially whether progress is being made. I expect that, if anything happens, it may happen as a sudden flood. More at the BBC.

From the Palestinian perspective, the biggest sticking point in getting to peace is the Right of Return. That is the right of Palestinian refugees, or their descendants, to return to their homes in what is now Israel from which they were expelled in 1948 at the foundation of the State of Israel. Hamas opposes the Road Map to Peace because it requires the Palestinians to give up their most powerful tool, violence, without any decision on the Right of Return. Israel opposes the Return because it would require that millions of Arabs be settled on land in Israel. But this land is occupied by Jews, many of whom were expelled from Arab countries in 1948 or arrived since then. In addition, if the Palestinians were allowed to return or even if the West Bank were reunited with Israel, the Arabs would overwhelm the Jews with their larger number, endangering the Jewish nature of the State of Israel.

The other sticking point is the Jewish nature of the State of Israel. Americans generally have no problem with this, in spite of our tradition of religious tolerance. The thinking goes that, all the other major religions (in the American mind, those are Christianity, Islam and Judaism) have their own countries, then the Jews should as well. Europeans, however, are less comfortable with this notion because it sounds so much like nationalism which has caused so much trouble in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. In fact, the wars in the Balkans in the 1990's and the Troubles in northern Ireland are nationalist movements. Europeans are now going through a process of suppressing nationalist tendencies in Europe through the strenghtening of the European Union. But can Israel give up its Jewish nature and unite with Arabs in one state? The notion seems unthinkable except for the most idealistic political scientist.

I haven't been writing for the past two weeks because I have been sick, it has been really hot here, there has been too much going on in my life, etc. I can come up with a million excuses. It is certainly not because there has been no news. But there has also been a problem of writer's block. I suppose all writers come to a point when they say to themselves, "there is so much that has been written, what can I say that is different?" So I'm just not sure what to write that hasn't already been written about current events.

I have been reading a book entitled "The Beginnings of Wisdom" about the philosophy behind the book of Genesis. It is fairly dense reading, so I have been going slowly. One of the main points is that the bible was not necessarily written as a historical document, but has a certain point of view that it is putting forward. I cannot sum it up in a simple and trite formula, but the book begins from the assumption that the inconsistencies and oddities of the bible story are placed there for a reason.

Here is sample of one of the point about the creation. When god created the world, he created light and separated day and night before he created the sun. This seems inconsistent with the natural world based on observance of the sun and how it works, even for the ancients. The reason, according to the author, is to demote the sun in the pantheon of creatures in the universe. At the time of the writing of the Bible, there were people across the earth, most notably in Egypt and Mesopotamia, who worshipped the sun. The Hebrews wanted to reject this sun worship, so demoted the sun by saying it was created after plants. Also, by listing the order of creation in the way it does, at odds with our observed and deduced knowledge of the universe, the Genesis writer states from the beginning that one cannot understand the world through observation and deduction, but through revelation by God.

As I said, the book is dense and takes each part of the story and analyses it from two to three different angles, the historical view, which is the most superficial view; the analytical view, breaking down the meaning of the words, the order in which things are presented, etc.; and the moral view, what is being taught by the text.

I do not agree with all of what he says but it is an interesting and educational read. He seems preoccupied in the footnotes with the idea that creation and evolution are not necessarily at odds with one another because the creation story is not necessarily a historical account, but a pedagogical account.

According to Thomas Friedman, columnist in the New York Times, “there were actually four reasons for this [Iraq] war: the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated reason.” That is an insightful way of looking at the justifications for the war. The Real Reason: the US needed to hit someone in the Arab world and Afghanistan wasn’t enough of a target to demonstrate our overwhelming power. The Right Reason: Because the US needed to partner with Iraqis to build a progressive Arab state. The Moral Reason: Because Saddam Hussein was a brutal, oppressive murderer. The Stated Reason: Weapons of Mass Destruction and links to terrorism. Friedman states that failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is irrelevant because “It was the wrong issue before the war, and it's the wrong issue now.”

But if this is the case, why are the media criticizing the failure to find weapons of mass destruction? What is undermining Bush and Blair’s credibility is not belief in the necessity of the war. Even now, as much as 75% of the US populace think the war was a good thing. What undermines credibility is the disconnect between why the war is now seen as a positive thing versus the bill of goods we were sold before the war. If there were good Moral and Right reasons for the war, why did the US focus so much on Weapons of Mass Destruction?

Donald Rumsfeld has now said that evidence of chemical or biological weapons might have been destroyed before the war. If this is the case, why did our intelligence not know that before the war started and why did the US not wait a few days for a report that the Iraqis had destroyed the weapons? Others have said that we will still find the weapons, but it will take some time. If time was needed, then why the rush to war? Why did the US not give UNMOVIC a couple of extra months to search for the weapons if they are now willing to give the US Army a couple of extra months?

The simple answer is that weapons of mass destruction were not the reason for war, only a justification. The reason that weapons of mass destruction became a focus lies in international law and US and UK domestic politics. It appears that the Bush administration had made a decision to go to war and the American and British people wanted a legal basis for war as represented by a UN resolution in support. But international law in the UN Security Council does not deal in what is moral or right, only in balances of power. The US focused on weapons of mass destruction because that was the only basis the UN had for issuing a resolution in support of the war. In the end, the UN did not pass a resolution and the US and UK went to war without a legal basis. Lack of a legal basis did not stop the war because the US and UK did not go to war for legal reasons and it did not go to war to find weapons of mass destruction.

A more popular route to getting international approval for the war would have been to focus on the moral reasons. If the Bush administration had focussed on Saddam Hussein’s brutality and made a case for war for moral reasons, then hearings in Congress and Parliament would probably not be taking place. If Colin Powell had gone to the UN with evidence of mass graves, torture, summary executions, then failure to find weapons of mass destruction would not be an issue. But if the US brought up issues of human rights in Iraq, it would have been open to charges of supporting other regimes in the world that do the same thing, such as Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Besides, the UN would probably not have issued a resolution to support the war on this basis. The Bush administration thought it had a better chance of getting the legal support it wanted on the basis of weapons of mass destruction.

It may be true that weapons of mass destruction was not the real reason for going to war, especially now that the war is a fait accompli. However, the fact that none have been found raises issues of abuse of power. There are hearings going on in the US Congress and the British Parliament now not because Democrats, Laborites, and moderate Republicans think that the war was a bad idea and want to discredit the reasons for it after the fact. Rather, they are upset that the President and Prime Minister may have lied to the American and British peoples by overstating the danger of the weapons of mass destruction.

The focus of these hearings are news reports that “a small group of Defense Department officials -- working outside of normal intelligence circles -- were directed in 2001 to find evidence of connections between Iraq and al-Qaida and weapons of mass destruction." Such pressure flies in the face of the purpose of intelligence gathering, which is to discover objective facts. Those facts are then turned over to policy makers in order to have good information with which to formulate policy. By forcing the facts to conform to the policy goal undermines the intelligence gathering process as well as the democratic process of policy making.

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction is not really an issue of whether or not we should have gone to war in Iraq. It is an issue now in the US and Britain because the American and British people don’t like to be lied to and this is how it is increasingly appearing to us.